The rest of us ride shotgun: Five automakers who have driven innovation

From assembly lines to EVs, the auto industry goes forward because of its great minds.

We may not write about cars every day here at Ars Technica, but as my colleague Sean Gallagher's recentarticles have shown, the automotive world is changing, and the technologies we do write about daily are infusing the vehicles we drive. That should be no surprise since the history of the automobile itself is a history of continuing innovation.

For more than a century, the auto industry has witnessed a succession of inventors, designers, engineers, salesmen, and others trying to transform the way we get from A to B. Some of the ideas have been better than others, and some of the people have been more successful than others—often with little overlap. It looks different depending on what decade you dip into (everything from automatic shifting to electronic fueling can be considered innovative at the time), but this drive for progress is constant.

The vehicles on our roads today have been transformed almost beyond recognition from the hand-built vehicles of the beginning of the car era. We take for granted the fact that cars in 2014 are safe, efficient, and affordable, and those attributes have been made possible by advances in engineering, organization management, and even society (not to mention borrowing the occasional good idea from the aerospace industry). With recent talk of V2V and the next-gen engines fresh on our minds, let's remember some of the most significant figures to have shaped the cars we drive—and even the world we live in—up to this point.

Henry Ford: A car for the people, production lines, a living wage, and the iconic V8

First up is almost certainly the best-known man on the list. Originally an engineer working for Thomas Edison, by the 1890s Henry Ford started tinkering with gasoline engines and horseless carriages. His very first venture, the Detroit Automobile Company, wasn't a rousing success. His second, the Henry Ford Company, lasted a year before Ford walked out the door, unable to get along with the company's stockholders. Third time proved to be a charm, and in 1903 the Ford Motor Company was created, with the original Model A as its product. His investors wanted the company to concentrate on building expensive cars for the wealthy, but Ford had other plans. He turned his attention to building a car for the middle classes, and the result was 1908's Ford Model T, the car that changed the world.

Demand for the Model T vastly outstripped supply at first—it went on sale for a mere $850 (around $20,000 today). Eager to sell more cars, Ford looked at the production process and began streamlining it where possible. Rather than having workers move from part-built car to part-built car, Ford instead implemented a production line, bringing the cars to the workers. A constantly moving conveyor belt shuffled the cars through the factory in ever-increasing stages of assembly. Completed vehicles drove out the doors at the end. By 1914, in the vast Highland Park factory, Model Ts were rolling off the line every 93 minutes. Model T factories were soon established abroad, bringing mass production and assembly lines to Europe, Japan, Argentina, and beyond.

Of even more significance than the mass-produced automobile, though, were Ford's decisions in 1914 to double his workers' hourly wage to $5 and shorten their work day to eight hours. By doing so, he established the idea that a job involving manual labor could pay a middle class wage—a trend soon adopted by other industrialists and maintained for decades. Perhaps his decision wasn't entirely altruistic, as it meant many more potential customers for Model Ts. All told, Ford built more than 15 million Model Ts between 1908 and 1927, setting a production record that wouldn't be matched until Volkswagen eclipsed it by building more than 21 million Beetles.

In 1932, Ford's final contribution to the automobile hit the streets: the V8, an engine that for many would come to symbolize America. Ford wasn't the first to join two rows of cylinders with a common crankshaft; he wasn't the first to make such an engine with eight cylinders. But until now, these engines were laborious and expensive to build. Ford's was the first V8 to have its engine block cast as a single piece, making it easy to mass produce. Robbie Coltrane's elegant paean to the Ford V8 provides more insight into this iconic engine and its undeniable impact on automotive history. Cheap and easily modified, the V8 gave bootleggers the power to evade the authorities; it gave rise to a generation of hot rods; it even gave us stock car racing.

Malcolm Sayer: Shaping the cars we drive with science

Jaguar's E-Type sports car seems to regularly top lists of the world's most beautiful cars, and we have Malcolm Sayer to thank for that. It's not that designers hadn't been creating elegant bodywork before him; coachbuilders like Figoni et Falaschi were creating works of art in the 1920s. Sayer, though, brought not just art but also science to the (drafting) table. In 1950, he was hired by Sir William Lyons, the founder and boss of Jaguar Cars, who wanted Sayer to apply his knowledge of aerodynamics—knowledge gained during the war as an engineer with the Bristol Aeroplane Company—to help the company's racing efforts.

Lyons, like Henry Ford before him, went racing as a way to showcase his cars. Ford used his early success to attract investors in the Ford Motor Company; for Lyons, success at the race track was a way to sell more cars. Sayer's first job at Jaguar was designing the body for the C-Type racing car. The C-Type was based on the world's fastest production car, Jaguar's XK-120 sports car, so winning the 24-hour race at Le Mans in France was the goal. To that end, Sayer designed the body of the C-Type according to aerodynamic principles. The first car designer to use a slide rule, he allegedly learned how to mathematically model the airflow around the complex 3D curves from a German professor he met in Baghdad. Whether that's true or not, the C-Type won Le Mans in 1951 and again in 1953.

1954's D-Type was as radical in design as it was unimaginative in name. The C-Type had borrowed from the world of aviation—its disk brakes adapted from the runway to the racetrack by Jaguar's chief test driver, Norman Dewis. By contrast, the D-Type drew yet more inspiration from the aeronautical industry. Up until this point, the chassis of a car—its structural body—was almost always a frame of some sort, to which the drivetrain, suspension, and bodywork would be mounted. The problem with this approach was one of rigidity; a car's suspension works best when the springs do the bending rather than the chassis. Commonly, a chassis would be a ladder frame of wood or steel, but the loads created by the car at speed, especially when cornering, would cause the frame to bend without a lot of heavy crossbracing. Spaceframes of welded tubing could be made quite stiff with enough bracing, but they were complex to design and labor-intensive to manufacture.

Enlarge/ A D-Type (right) and C-Type (left) at a classic car race in 2008.

Rather than a tubular spaceframe like the C-Type, the D-Type's body was designed around a tub of lightweight aluminum alloy panels riveted and welded together into a unibody, or semi-monocoque, chassis. This idea wasn't entirely new—that honor falls to Lancia back in 1922—but such cars were few and far between even by the 1950s. The monocoque design was both light and stiff, and Sayer clothed it with a curvaceous body that gave it a much lower drag coefficient than its predecessor (without the C-Type's rather alarming habit of generating rear lift at high speed). Speed sold in those days, and the key feature of the Le Mans circuit was the three-mile Mulsanne Straight. The D-Type could reach 175mph here, 25mph faster than the earlier car.

When Jaguar pulled out of racing in 1956, Sayer adapted the lessons learned from the racing D-Type into the road-going E-Type. Capable of 150mph, or near enough, the E-Type offered the car buyer of 1961 performance that would rival anything Ferrari or Aston Martin could offer for less than half the price, $5,595 for the convertible, $5,895 for the coupe (a bit less than $47,000 in today's money). The E-Type's shape, as with Sayer's other work, stemmed not just from his skills with a slide rule, but from constant testing and experimentation. Body shapes were tested with scale models in a wind tunnel belonging to the UK's Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough. Once satisfied, lots of 3" strips of wool were stuck to full-size cars to visualize the airflow at speed, and Dewis would then pound around a test track with Sayer in the passenger seat, observing the results and issuing commands via hand signals. The result, in the case of the E-Type, was a car that many have called the world's most beautiful.

Fast forward several decades, and you'll struggle to find a car that hasn't benefited from either a wind tunnel or complex fluid dynamics. Meanwhile, a Jaguar E-Type is sitting in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, bought by the museum as part of its permanent collection back in 1996.